Cleaning sucks. Sure, it’s nice and satisfying when you’re done, but stuffing your hands in dirt and swabbing filth around the floor is basically unpleasant. There’s no need to make it more unpleasant by letting a multi-billion dollar conglomerate rob you blind. Put differently: You should stop Swiffering and buy a nice vacuum.

20 July 2015

Reddit’s new chief alien, Steve Huffman, announced a vaguely worded set of new content guidelines yesterday afternoon. The general takeaway? Bad stuff is bad and should be banned. The subtext? If Steve Huffman says stuff isn’t bad — like racism — it will be tolerated. Come again?

10 July 2015

For the last month or so, I’ve been reading lots of stories about a Blackberry smartphone running Android. Today, a Blackberry/Android partnership seems even more certain. Blackberry has seen better days, so we can expect a last-ditch effort. What I didn’t expect is having so many feels about it.

28 May 2015

Rumour has it, Apple wants to give you the option to use read receipts on a contact-by-contact basis in iMessage. This is a dreadfully bad idea that will undoubtedly destroy relationships, estrange friends, and piss off teens. Why? Because read receipts are awful, and making them more sophisticated is bullshit.

22 May 2015

We have no one to blame but ourselves. The publishers of the official Scrabble wordlist have announced the addition of words like “blech,” “lolz,” and “thanx” to the list. To borrow a word from their new list, YEESH.

8 April 2015

There’s nothing new about streaming video from your phone, or posting live news updates from important events. But now companies are trying to make the experience of streaming your life more real than ever before — and they’re doing it by telling us very dangerous white lies.

4 April 2015

Netflix is apparently super-close to inking a deal to reboot Full House, everyone’s favourite family-oriented sitcom about a grieving widower, his children, and his screw-up adult permanent houseguests leeching off his benevolence and remarkable real estate in San Francisco. And you know what? Uncles Jesse and Joey aren’t the only leeches in this situation. Netflix has cornered the market on milking ’90s nostalgia, and the reboot fever it has inspired in the golden age of TV is bad for the art form and worse for our memories.

31 March 2015

Bluetooth is an incredible invention. iTunes is a mediocre media player. But if you use a Mac, you can’t have one without the other. Any time you connect a Bluetooth Audio device, OS X opens iTunes. This is a feature that you can’t turn off, and it’s annoying as hell.

11 March 2015

You have not read a truly digital book until you’ve read The New World. The novella is about a woman trying to reclaim her dead husband’s head from a cult-like cryogenics company. But more than that, it is the most ambitious attempt I’ve seen at exploring a future where books lack physical form and are better for it.